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New Horizons Releases Results
hendric writes to mention New Horizons had a press conference yesterday for the preliminary results from their Jupiter flyby. Quite a few images are also available on their site, like Europa Rising."
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That would be a cool picture if it didn't have an ugly cheeto colored banner saying "Europa Rising".
Oh, and that other message that says, "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS--EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE."
You might want to see the photo of Europa rising from the original website : http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/imag es/HighRes/050107/050107_01.jpg
( Especially after seeing the huge title across the first picture )
Only 2994 days until we reach the closest mission path point to Pluto! As official decorate-for-the-holidays time manager for Sears, I have a special talent for knowing when to begin reminding people of important events so I declare the countdown to Pluto to be on! We'll start laying out the plastic globes in 2010...
Demented But Determined.
It may be a non-planet, but none of the Kuiper belt objects have been studied yet, and Pluto is a start.
I wish the astronomy groups would get their adjective usage right, or at least consistent. A dwarf planet is somehow not a planet, but a dwarf star is a star. Sol is a dwarf star, so does that make it not a star? That sort of dissonance makes calling Ceres a planet seem sensible in comparison. Anyway, I support the notion of not calling Pluto a planet, I'm just disappointed that they had to odd twisting of words to do it.
Before the flyby, the New Horizons science team asked a bunch of us amateurs at http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/ to search for "pretty pictures", pictures that didn't necessarily have scientific value, but were beautiful and worth taking. Europa Rising and the Io and Europa conjunction were the first two returned. The others I suggested were two double shadow transits, a crescent Callisto emerging from behind a crescent Jupiter, and a crescent Ganymede in front of a crescent Jupiter. :)
Enjoying my 15 minutes of fame.
"Though it may take a thousand years, we shall be FREE."
Check out the asteroid belt, next time you're in the vicinity. It's a gold mine, in every sense. The amount of wealth out there is "beyond imagination".
Just one moderate-sized asteroid (Eros) is estimated to contain $1,000 billion in gold alone - more than has been mined (or indeed could ever be mined ) from Earth's crust in recorded history. Then there's the platinum and the other metals, minerals and rare earths, roughly $20,000 billion in total. And there's millions of asteroids in the belt.
It's not just the mineral wealth that has people interested. It's estimated that maybe half of the asteroids are carbonaceous, containing 20% water and a further 10% oxygen extractable from other sources (good fuel source stuff). Additionally, there are significant amounts of carbon and nitrogen - in total, enough basic resources to support human life on a huge scale. It's likely going to be easier to colonise the asteroids than to colonise Mars.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Because nothing has been the way we thought it would be:
-Before we orbited the moon, everyone assumed the back would look like the front
-Before we sent a probe to Mars, nobody knew what to expect, anything a Martian civilization to... something like the Moon. Even now Mars has many aspects to it that deny simple explanation, things like what lies more than a few inches below its surface or why it has anomalous amounts of methane in its atmosphere
-Before we sent a probe to Jupiter, everyone assumed that the moons there would be cold, inanimate frozen rocks... rather than posessing the largest volcanoes and deepest oceans in the solar system
-Before we landed a probe on Titan, speculation was rife about what could be there, because you just couldn't tell. Now that have a vague idea, it's weirder than anybody guessed
If I can assure you one thing about Pluto, it will be that absolutely no one will have predicted what will be there correctly. And that's what makes it worth looking.